Confronting the future of Web standards

As technology consumers, we accept that the Web is built on open standards. We are told that an entire standards body, the W3C, exists to maintain them. Dig a little further, however, and we find that the history and the issues behind the standards are far more complex than they appear to be. As any long-suffering Web developer can tell you, the process of drafting W3C standards is as slow and laborious as any i

As technology consumers, we accept that the Web is built on open standards. We are told that an entire standards body, the W3C, exists to maintain them. Dig a little further, however, and we find that the history and the issues behind the standards are far more complex than they appear to be.

As any long-suffering Web developer can tell you, the process of drafting W3C standards is as slow and laborious as any in the industry. As a result, standardization alone can't account for the rapid growth of content and applications that we've seen on the Web -- and it won't be the only force guiding its future.

At the recent Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Alex Russell, the project lead for the Dojo Toolkit, gave a fascinating presentation on the potential future of the browser. According to Russell, if you plot the market share of the various Web browsers over the last 15 years, the resulting graph shows a clear cycle of natural monopolies.

A single browser -- first Netscape, then Internet Explorer -- gained market share until it became the clear leader, commanding in excess of 80 percent of the market. Only after it had achieved peak saturation did the leader's share begin trickling off, making way for the next natural monopoly.

Given this data, you could argue that the success of the Web owes less to the fact that HTML is an open standard than to the fact that a few major vendors -- primarily Microsoft and Netscape -- made HTML and its related languages (JavaScript and CSS) into de facto standards. Ubiquity gave those vendors the power to push the features that they wanted while the W3C lumbered along at its usual pace; the rise of XMLHttpRequest is but one example.

How important is this process? "De facto standards are the only ones that matter," writes Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz in a recent blog post. "Well-intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time."

Of course, de facto standards don't have to be proprietary; in fact, Schwartz paints an optimistic picture. As computing spreads within emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Africa, he argues, open standards and free software will be what makes it affordable.